The Bowery Boys Year In Review 2016

After a rowdy and wild election season, we enter 2017 with New York City poised to take a new — and highly unusual — prominence in American politics. (This episode from 2011 is now officially the weirdest episode in the Bowery Boys back catalog).

We arrive at the new year with glass condominiums transforming the skyline at a faster rate than ever, and the first new subway station in a quarter centurypoised to shape the Upper East Side. But we lost other New York institutions like Carnegie Deli and Ziegfeld Cinema. (Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York has the complete list.) And we greet the new year with few cultural icons — Gene Wilder, Florence Henderson, Harper Lee, David Bowie, Prince, Carrie Fisher.

We were genuinely honored this year to finally meet and hang out with so many of you thanks to the release of our first ever book. It’s been an extraordinary year for us — and all because of our listeners and readers. We are grateful for your support and listenership.

Here’s the list of every episode we released in 2016. From the triumphs of Jane Jacobs to the revival of the Bronx. Go back and listen to them all! We plan to release just as many shows in 2017 with a few more extra surprises in store.

Have a safe and wonderful New Year’s Eve celebration and a prosperous and rewarding 2017!

The first Ferris Wheel was invented to become America’s Eiffel Tower, making its grand debut at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The wheel’s inventor George Washington Gale Ferris was a clever and optimistic soul; he did everything in his power to ensure that his glorious mechanical ride would forever change the world. That it did, but unfortunately, its inventor paid a horrible price.

The origin story of Lincoln Center, an elegy to the neighborhood its campus replaced, and a celebration of West Side Story, the film that brings together several aspects of this story in one glorious musical number.

PLUS the first five episodes of The First: Stories of Inventions and Their Consequences

Miss Draper: The First Woman Photographed

Dorothy Catherine Draper is a truly forgotten figure in American history. She was the first woman to ever sit for a photograph — a daguerrotype, actually, in the year 1840, upon the rooftop of the school which would become New York University..

American eating habits were transformed in the early 20th century with innovations in freezing and refrigeration, allowing all kinds of foods to be shipped across the country and stored for long periods of time.

But it would actually be the television set that would inspire one of the strangest creations in culinary history — the TV dinner.

The Pledge of Allegiance feels like an American tradition that traces itself back to the Founding Fathers, but, in fact, it’s turning 125 years old in 2017. This is the story of the invention of the Pledge, a set of words that have come to embody the core values of American citizenship. And yet it began as part of a for-profit magazine promotion, written by a Christian socialist minister!

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